The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

As fractious and potentially incendiary at the Japan-China territorial tempest has become--and it has become horrendously fractious and

日本語: 東シナ海ガス田掘削マップ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

potentially incendiary, and will certainly get worse before getting better--it is not without a very important, even vital, silver lining.

It is this: the crisis’s sharp escalation has forced thoughtful Japanese to consider the costs to their country of severe, long term political and economic estrangement from China. What the analysis reveals is that prolonged political and, especially, economic and social estrangement from China would be an unmitigated disaster for the Japanese nation.

The truth is, not only today and tomorrow, but even more so in the years and decades ahead, as Japan’s economy matures and its population shrinks and ages, continued growth and prosperity of Japan’s economy and society will require increasingly deep and broad integration with a more vibrant Asia, and particularly with China.

And there is another critically important, not to be forgotten fact: while the past, current, and any sustainable future economic and trade relationship between Japan and China will be based upon mutual benefit, the fundamental truth is that Japan must value the relationship more highly than China because Japan really has no good alternatives. Not so China, which can get much or all of what it wants from Japan from many willing European and North American suppliers.

Put another way, the costs (including opportunity costs) of estrangement for China will be relatively small, easily bearable, and likely to decline over time. For Japan they will be huge, painfully onerous, and likely to rise over time.

In short, Japan and China need each other, but Japan needs China more (I would say much more) than China needs Japan. And when I say “needs”--for Japan--I mean a need that is vital. In this sense, in facing and thinking about the current crisis over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, the apparition that must appear to Japanese is a specter of doom.

Why then, and how, could Japan have gotten into a situation like this, and is there a way out?

I have written before in this blog that China had long been prepared to leave the matter of the Senkaku Islands/Diaoyu Dao unresolved between the two countries--and not to try to force a change in the status quo--with the important condition that Japan acknowledge China’s territorial claim (i.e., to admit that the islands were “disputed”). Japan, for its own reasons (though U.S. influence was probably a factor) steadfastly refused to acknowledge the Chinese claim.

Given this fundamental conflict, perhaps it was only a matter of time before a crisis erupted. In the event, the crisis was precipitated by Tokyo mayor Ishihara’s reckless bid to buy the islands from a private Japanese owner. It was to this move--certain to be a provocation toward China--that the Noda government felt it had no choice but to respond with a national government purchase (“nationalization”) of the islands.

Is the Noda government move to be criticized as an amplification of the recklessness and provocation that would have resulted from Ishihara’s gambit? It is being justified as a force majeure response--an attempt to reduce the risks of more serious conflict with longer term--by the central government: a form of crisis management that was a lesser of two evils response to a set of bad options. But it was also the wrong choice among the options.